Yeats Revisited by Kathleen Raine

Yeats Revisited by Kathleen Raine Miguel Angel Montezanti Abstract: It is frequently stated that Yeats is a great poet despite the fact that his mind, tastes and inclinations were dangerously or eccentrically turned to mysterious or mystified matters. It is Kathleen Raine’s contention that, far from being too credulous, Yeats was extremely conscious of his advances in this type of knowledge; and that words such as esoteric, occultism, hermetic lore and some others are more often misunderstood. The Academy misreads Yeats in the same way that it has misread Blake or Shelley. That traditional background is not the one which the Academy usually deals with. Yeats did not write his poems to provide material for doctoral theses but to heal and sustain our human condition. Yeats’s poems related to the Irish Renaissance are concerned with an Ireland of the Imagination. In Kathleen’s opinion, Yeats remains a poet in the traditional sense of the word, not in the modern one. The traditional meaning would account for a speaker of wisdom, truth and the tradition of the Imagination. Keywords: Yeats’s poetry; Irish tradition; Kathleen Raine. Katheen Raine (1908-2003) was a poet, critic and essayist as well. Her books on criticism have been translated into several languages. Her main concerns have been William Blake and W.B. Yeats, among other poets in which she perceives the “learning of the imagination”. The purpose of this article is to analyze her stance as regards Yeats as an occultist or an esoteric since it is not infrequently stated that Yeats is a great poet despite the fact that his mind, tastes and inclinations were dangerously or eccentrically turned to mysterious or mystified matters. Just to illustrate this point I mention a review of a biography published in the Literary Supplement of La Nación as late as 1997. The author, John Carey, reviews a monumental biography written by Roy Foster (1997) and calls Yeats’s non-poetical activities, like those concerned with Irish nationalism and the Dublin Theatre, “distractions”. He says that Yeats’s ideas about the spiritual superiority of the Celts and about his programme of the Irish theatre are a mess of racism, pastoral primitivism, snob and rationalized desires. The most disturbing passage, however, so far as this article is concerned, is the one in which the reviewer says that Yeats’s credulity had no limits; that he had been introduced into mysticism and magic by George Russell; that he (Yeats) 49 Abei Journal 17.indd 49 03/07/2016 15:51:46 took pills of hashish and imagined he was traveling to the heavenly bodies and regions of secret knowledge.1 The reviewer remarks that these aspects described by Roy Foster can be more or less humorous but become tedious after some pages. It is Kathleen Raine’s contention that, far from being too credulous, Yeats was extremely conscious of his advances in this type of knowledge; and that words such as esoteric, occultism, hermetic lore and some others are more often misunderstood. Kahleen Raine devoted three substantial books to Yeats. Incidentally, as is frequently the case, these books and articles tell as many things about Yeats as about Raine herself; since she, in a way, went through a spiritual itinerary similar to that of the Irish poet.2 Though I have chosen to comment on Kathleen Raine’s W.B. Yeats and the Learning of Imagination, it is obvious that the remaining books on Yeats written by her are worthy of close attention as well. Her opening remarks exhibit a stance about Yeats not very far from that already mentioned: she refers to an American Professor, R.P. Blackmur, who speaks about disbelief. Kathleen Raine comments critically: “Academy believed that disbelief is a form, even the ultimate form of wisdom” (Raine 1999, 2). She remembers that Orwell, Auden and other writers had accused Yeats of ignorance of the “leading ideas” of the time. She remarks that University or Academic Studies, heavily influenced by materialism and positivism, show this same kind of prejudices concerning Yeats’s knowledge and practices. As first editor of Blake’s prophetic books, Kathleen Raine calls Yeats “Blake’s greatest disciple”. To understand her insight into Yeats it is necessary a parallel understanding of her insight into Blake. In Yeats the Initiate, Raine (1986) had declared her purpose: “to indicate a few of the many threads from the rich texture of Yeats’s work; to indicate a few of the many themes in which he embodied the beauty and wisdom of his vision and his learning” (13). In her opinion, the Academy misreads Yeats in the same way that it has misread Blake or Shelley. Yeats’s acquaintance with a traditional background is not the one which the Academy usually deals with. Yeats wrote his poems to heal and sustain our human condition. Those related to the Irish Renaissance are concerned with an Ireland of the Imagination. This feature, which was also highly appreciated by Blake himself, must not be taken as synonym of “unreal”. It belongs to a different realm: a loyalty to which Yeats terms “loyalty to the vanished kingdom” as the main feature he perceives in the Irish tradition, collected in folk songs and folklore in County Sligo. His fairy world is therefore a mythological inheritance enriched through Blake’s Neo-Platonism and also through English translations of Indian texts, some by Rabindranah Tagore and some by Ananda Coomaraswamy. Raine is very conscious of how the thirties assessed Yeats’s values and achievements: he had had a nice reputation as a poet not because but in spite of his “ridiculous” ideas. Now, she insists, Yeats was acquainted with a profound knowledge, not the one that is taught in Western Schools. He was familiar with Neo-Platonism through Blake and possessed a substantial lore derived form his contact with the Indian texts, for example the Upanishads, which he mentions frequently, and the Bhagavad Gita. Yeats confesses that along many years he frequented 50 Abei Journal 17.indd 50 03/07/2016 15:51:46 those mediums who in various poor parts of London instruct artisans or their wives for a few pence upon their relations to their dead. … then I compared what she [Lady Gregory] had heard in Galway, and I in London, with the visions of Swedenborg, and, after my inadequate notes had been published with Indian belief. [Had not been under the influence of Lady Gregory], I might never have talked with Shri Purohit Swami nor made him translate his Master’s travels in Tibet, nor helped him translate the Upanishads”. (Selected Criticism 263) This is the knowledge of the Philosophia Perennis, in which Raine herself participates, very far from the naïve materialism of our age. Golden Age and Iron Age alternate and ancient traditions are the clue to understand Yeats’s poem “A Vision”, written just before his death. In the critic’s opinion, Yeats remains a poet in the traditional sense of the word, not in the modern one. The traditional meaning would account for a speaker of wisdom, truth and the tradition of the imagination; whereas the modern meaning is for her that of a user of words with no authority above the others; the modern poet will be restricted to the concept that materialism is reality. Yeats shares with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land the lamentation for the passing of those traditional values and with T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets an attempt to rescue them. This is what Yeats expresses poetically: We were the last romantics – chose for theme Traditional sanctity and loveliness; Whatever’s written in what poets name The book of people; whatever most can bless The mind of man or elevate a rhyme; But all is changed, that high horse riderless, Though mounted in that saddle Homer rode Where the swan drifts upon the darkening flood. (Raine 1999, 22) Kathleen Raine comments that “high horse” is Pegasus, now riderless, that is, without a superior force to rule it and that the swan (symbol of the soul) is now drifting in the darkness. Imaginative knowledge belongs to the type that Mozart and Beethoven possessed. It is an immediate, not a discursive knowledge, such as that of love, of a tree, of a waterfall or of a star. This special kind of imagination could be better described with a neologism coined by Henri Corbin, imaginal, as the commoner word “imaginative” can distort Raine’s intended meaning. In a way similar to that of Coleridge as regards “primary imagination”, Yeats wrote in “The Trembling of the Veil”: I know how that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memoried self that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusk and the child in the womb, and that teaches the birds to make their nest; and that genius is a crisis that joins that buried self for certain moments to our trivial daily mind. (apud Raine 1999, 23) 51 Abei Journal 17.indd 51 03/07/2016 15:51:46 It is not surprising that the young poet supporting these ideas was inclined to study Blake and Swedenborg: I had an unshakable conviction arising how or whence I cannot tell, that invisible gate would open as they have opened for Blake, as they opened for Swedenborg, as they opened for Boehme, and that this philosophy would find its manuals of devotion in all imaginative literature”. (op. cit. 24) English Romantic poets and the Noh Theatre, Dante, the Arabian Nights, the Jewish and the Christian kabala, Plato, Plotinus and the oral tradition of Western Ireland constitute a fertile background for Yeats.3 To them the names of Berkeley, Wundt and Pico della Mirandola can be added, and medieval mysticism and alchemy.4 In his introduction to the 1928 edition of A Vision, Yeats writes: The other day Lady Gregory said to me ‘You are a much better educated man than you were ten years ago and much more powerful in argument’.

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